How to Boost Your ROI on Video Marketing Efforts

91% of businesses are using video in their marketing campaigns. There's an ongoing ‘snooze, you lose’ battle for customers' attention, and your competitors have their battle plan drawn out. Do you have yours?

Video content has become an integral part of many businesses' marketing strategies. Video marketing has hit an all-new high in recent years with the rise of Instagram Reels, TikTok and recently, YouTube Shorts. With every business clamoring to be the next viral sensation, we’ve seen successes and failures of every shade. Some video marketing strategies and execution end up on the trends chart, while many don’t get a second glance.

Video marketing can be cost-intensive, so knowing why, what, and how you target customers is critical for turning video into ROI.

What You'll Learn

The Relevance Of Video Marketing ROI

Videos are not new in the marketing space, but why are more businesses seemingly into video production lately? It's simple: videos capture the viewer's attention longer than a photo. The most valuable currency today is attention, making a return on investment in videos more plausible in marketing campaigns.

Video is a visual medium and people are naturally drawn to visuals, which makes it better than plain text. Video marketing statistics have shown that videos are very effective.

According to Wyzowl, 95% of marketers say video marketing helped increase their brand awareness and recognition in 2022 and many of them intend to do more video content in 2023.

The power of video marketing is such that you can search for anything on Google and find video results with time stamps of the exact moment that answers your question.

Videos work for almost everyone

How many hours do you spend watching videos online daily? You can probably give a ballpark figure on the total time you spend switching between Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter. But can you guess how many marketing videos you watch during that time? Probably not.

People love videos. This should tell you that videos have already become a big part of the online experience. So how do you, as a marketer, steal some eyeballs for your brand?

You need to know how to target, spend, measure and optimize your videos. This is how you can get returns on your video marketing efforts.

Video can be used to better educate customers about a product or service, as well as to build trust and loyalty with existing customers. It can be used to target specific demographics and even psychographics. If your video can show the potential benefits for your customers at different points along the sales or conversion funnel, you’ll be looking at a positive video content ROI.

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Video Assets as Unique As the Stream They Target

Grabbing your iPhone and recording can be a great way to get started with video. But effective segmentation of your assets can significantly increase their value. Consider the audience you're targeting, the reaction you want to elicit, and the channel they'll live on.

Yeah...that can sound daunting. That's where Superside can really help: with a dedicated video partner, you can create all these assets and more. Here's a few types of video you can mull over in the meantime:

Explainer videos are short videos that explain your website or a product to existing and potential customers concisely and engagingly.

Vlogs (video blogs) are short videos posted online to share opinions, experiences, and other valuable content with your viewers.

Video interviews are conducted with potential employees, customers, partners, or influencers to gain insight into their experiences, testimonials and opinions.

Live stream recordings are recordings of live streams which broadcasts events that are happening in real-time to share with a wider audience. You can save live stream recordings to view later.

Products reviews and demos are interactive demonstrations of your product in action, which allows the customer to see the product’s features, benefits and drawbacks, including how it works.

Tutorials are instructional videos that teach a specific skill or guide the viewer on how to use a particular product or service. If your viewers find this helpful it helps to boost brand engagement.

Behind-the-scenes (BTS) videos show the process of making a product. It can also include interviews with your employees, and behind-the-scenes footage of the challenges faced as well.

Video ads promote the products and services of a business and can be seen on websites, social media platforms, and streaming services. Top video ads engage your viewers faster and can also convert them.

Case Study Spotlight: PointCard

PointCard reached out to Superside looking for a design service that could help them iterate on and improve their online video ads.

PointCard is a fintech company on a mission to become the de facto standard payments platform for everyday spending. With their strong internal design team, PointCard used Superside to create nearly 30 creative video ad concepts, resulting in a 240% increase in CTR and a click-to-install conversion rate growth of 275%.

This increased ROI came from constant innovation and experimentation. Strongly aligning with the data and performance metrics, the Superside team tweaked the ad every three to four days; slowly creating a version with the highest possible performance.

Regardless of the video content that you're creating, remember to experiment and document every change you make: it's one of the most effective ways of creating a high-performing video ad.

Why Video Marketing is Effective

A Vidyard survey shows that 73% of marketers agree that videos have become more important to their business in the last year and more organizations are focusing their efforts on video content ROI. Here are a few reasons why video marketing is effective:

Improved targeting

Analyzing video content can help you better understand your target audience and tailor your content to meet their needs. It can help improve your website's SEO to reach more people, drive website traffic and increase conversions. The same applies to your social media platforms.

Increased engagement

Video can also create an emotional connection with customers, leading to higher engagement and increased sales. By understanding how viewers interact with your video content, you can create more engaging content that resonates with your audience.

Improved analytics

Analyzing video content can provide valuable insights into how viewers interact with your content. This can help you better understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize them for better results. Analytics also helps you to keep up with the latest trends as well as discover how to provide the best experience for your customers.

Better budget allocation

By understanding your video content structure, you can make better decisions about where to allocate your budget and how to optimize your campaigns for maximum returns.

The Right Data for Measuring Your Video ROI

Video ROI can be measured by engagement – defined as things like shares, likes, and comments, but this is not the same for all businesses. Your video marketing ROI should be measured relative to your brand’s goals and desired metrics.

Video Marketing ROI calculation:

The benefit (or return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment.

It would be in your best interest to analyze your investment in videos and the results that have been made in that area. Gains would include an increase in the number of your subscribers, leads, customers and revenue. Meanwhile, the cost will be represented by your production costs.

Example:

Company A sells software at wholesale prices to customers. The company decides to spend $20,000 on a video marketing campaign for Black Friday. The campaign resulted in the following:

100,000 views
5,000 website visits
1,000 leads
400 conversions

Calculating the ROI:

ROI ⇒ (Revenue - Cost) / Cost * 100

Revenue ⇒ 300 conversions x $100 (assuming a piece of software costs $100) = $30,000

ROI ⇒ ($30,000 - $20,000) / $20,000 * 100 = 50%

In this example, the video marketing campaign for Company A resulted in a 50% ROI; not a bad campaign.

While not all marketing campaigns can give a great ROI as in the example above, the principle of calculating ROI stays the same throughout. If you get out more than you put in; you’ve made a positive return on investment.

Ways To Improve Your Video Marketing ROI

If you still doubt the effectiveness of video marketing, consider the ads you watched on television when you were young. How many of those ads left an impression on you and why?

Just so you know, videos are the founding fathers of immersive experience and they’ll continue to be relevant in the future. Perhaps you believe that it takes a lot of work to create engaging video content, including the cost and the technical challenges. Regardless, you want to do what's best for your brand. Here are some of the ways that you can improve the video marketing ROI for your brand.

Know your audience

Understanding your audience and the content they are most likely to consume will help you be able to curate your video content that they find appealing and engaging. As such, online video ads can drive an increase in revenue and your return on investment (ROI). So ensure that you are using the right message in your ads, for the right audience, and through the right channels.

Create quality content

Invest in creating quality videos that will boost your brand’s authority as well as create awareness for your customers, both old and new. There’s a big difference between videos that come across as genuine and videos made by influencers to market a brand that can come across as scripted and fake. Video content ROI can be improved with User Generated Content (UGC) and Employee-Generated Content (EGC) both of which are unique and authentic ways to promote your business.

How To Utilize Your Investments

As technology advances, businesses will continue to include video in their marketing strategy to generate leads. Video ROI will continue to climb for those who can manage, analyze and distribute their video content smartly. And yes, your competitors are in on it too.

39% of video marketers feel video marketing is becoming more expensive. It may require you to put effort and resources into producing videos that showcase your products and services in an engaging and visually appealing way. However, it shouldn't be super expensive or difficult to do.

Hire Professional Services

There's no need to hesitate or miss out on the benefits of video marketing if you have yet to figure out the right tools, skills, or people to aid with your video production.

Creating a video ad or developing a video marketing campaign can be considerably time-intensive, especially if you’re a smaller company.

Many businesses benefit from the use of agencies, freelancers, or CaaS providers. If you’re not sure whether hiring externally is for you, we’ve created an in-depth guide below.

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Optimize for SEO

If you’re creating your videos in-house, along with the visuals and message, ensure that your videos are optimized for search engines and are easy to find on all your platforms. This will help get more reach and also help you to be able to analyze the performance of the video.

For best performance, keep your videos concise, bearing in mind that the focus should be on one central theme or idea for each video.

Study trends, don’t follow

The market is competitive and fast-paced so ensure that you study the trends to predict what will likely happen. This gives your business an early mover advantage as your competition will only play catch up. This can be done by tracking engagements and optimizing your content with newer approaches while testing and measuring as you move.

Promote your video

When you create videos that break down complex concepts or tell captivating stories, don’t stop at sharing them on all your platforms. Create a detailed marketing and distribution plan for your videos. You can also use marketing automation tools to streamline your video marketing efforts.

These help your business increase efficiency, reduce costs, and improve the customer experience by delivering relevant and personalized messaging across multiple channels.

That's a Wrap!

Video marketing is a highly effective way to reach consumers. When businesses create engaging and relevant videos, they can increase brand awareness, lead generation, and sales revenue.

With the appropriate metrics and tools, companies can measure their video content ROI and make data-driven decisions to enhance their strategies.

As video becomes an increasingly important medium in today's digital landscape, businesses that invest in it will reap its benefits for years to come.